SF homeless population swells by 17% in latest tally

1of6James Janisse and his wife, Lisa Janisse (right), have lived in a travel trailer on Cesar Chavez Street for about a year.Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

2of6Tony Lawrence, who earns money recycling cardboard boxes, sits in his RV, his home for three years on Cesar Chavez Street.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

3of6A school bus and a towing camper are seen lined up on Caesar Chavez Street in San Francisco, Calif., on Monday, February, 2019. San Francisco Supervisor Vallie Brown is proposing legislation designed to help people camping in their cars and RV's by giving them a designated and safe place to park.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

4of6Erika talks to her partner Edwin at their RV in the Bayview neighborhood on Wednesday, Oct. 17, 2018, in San Francisco, Calif.Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

5of6Mobile homes, RV's and other vehicles are seen parked along Evans Avenue on Thursday, May 16, 2018 in San Francisco, Calif.Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

6of6James Janisse (l to r) and Lisa Janisse stand outside the travel trailer they live in on Thursday, May 16, 2018 in San Francisco, Calif.Photo: Lea Suzuki / The Chronicle

Despite creating hundreds of new shelter beds and spending more than $300 million annually on homelessness, San Francisco has seen the number of homeless people in the city rise by 17% since 2017 — with a whopping amount of that increase coming from people living in vehicles.

A preliminary summary of January’s one-night street count released Thursday pegged the new number of homeless people in the city at 8,011, but that number is sure to be lower than the more complete count to be released in July. That’s because it was calculated using federal guidelines, which don’t account for as many types of homelessness as those the city uses.

Still, the federal data give an early glimpse of what city officials will be finding out in more detail later, and the glimpse is bracing.

The number of people living in cars, RVs and other vehicles has risen by 45% since the last one-night count was taken two years ago. That much has been anecdotally evident for months, particularly in industrial Bayview neighborhoods, where vehicle colonies have sprouted in ever-increasing numbers over the past year.

Overall, the new count indicates at least 1,153 more homeless people are in the streets compared with two years ago, when the federal tally set the total number at 6,858.

The 2017 count total typically cited by the city has been 7,499 homeless people. That’s because the national guidelines set by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development exclude several categories of people counted as homeless by San Francisco officials, including people in jail, hospitals and many health treatment centers.

San Francisco hasn’t had a one-night count higher than 8,000 since 2004, the year then-Mayor Gavin Newsom began a major push to house and counsel chronically homeless people. The homeless population that year was listed as 8,640, using city-set guidelines.

On a brighter note, the number of homeless veterans in Thursday’s report went down 14%, the youth count dipped 10%, and the number of homeless families remained unchanged. Sheltered homeless people rose 13%, but that was largely because 412 new shelter beds have opened since July, when London Breed became mayor.

Tallies from the other two Bay Area counties with the most severe homelessness problems, Santa Clara and Alameda, went up significantly more than San Francisco’s. Santa Clara’s homeless population rose by 31% over the past two years to 9,706, and Alameda’s rose 43% to 8,022.

As the two-year counts are released across the state, the same trend is holding — up 64% in Kern County and up 43% in Orange County. The only area reporting a drop so far is Marin County, where its already small homeless population dipped 7% to 1,034.

But that was small comfort to San Francisco. Its increase was not entirely unexpected — a controller’s office survey released Monday found that 75% of residents believe homelessness has gotten worse since 2017.

“I’m really disappointed in these numbers,” said Jeff Kositsky, head of the city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing. “I can make no excuses. These numbers are bad, and we have to own that.

“The problem of people living in vehicles is increasing at an alarming rate, and we are taking steps to address this,” he said. Chief among those are expansion of a street counseling team Kositsky created to address vehicle campers and plans to create a Vehicle Triage Center in the coming year where people can park and get city help finding housing.

Breed also said she found the numbers “disappointing,” but added, “unfortunately it’s not a big surprise.”

“Certainly there is more we need to do, but at the end of the day this is a challenge that exists in the entire state of California,” she said.

Figures from 2018 showed that California had 129,972 homeless people — the biggest street population of any state and 24% of the nation’s total. San Francisco, with perhaps the most visible problem of homelessness, has the state’s highest rents, home costs and income inequity between rich and poor.

“What does that tell you?” Breed said. “We need more resources from the federal and state governments for housing, period, and we need to build housing faster. S.F. can’t do it alone.”

She said she has several plans in the works to step up the city’s homelessness efforts, including opening 304 new shelter beds and 300 more units of permanent supportive housing this year. She’s also proposing a ballot measure for a $500 million affordable housing bond, and supports rezoning efforts to allow higher-density, more affordable housing.

“There’s not just one thing that’s going to fix this,” she said. “I know this count will discourage a lot of people, but it’s important to remember where we were last year. Last year you saw a lot of big tent camps — like at 13th Street, and now we have a beautiful Navigation Center (shelter) there. We’ve helped 1,200 people out of homelessness since I came into office. We have made progress.”

Kositsky said city tracking data show that for every person who exits homelessness, three fall into it. Santa Clara and Alameda counties also are showing similar trends, and, bolstered by a Bay Area Council report issued last month calling for more regional cooperation on homeless efforts, planners across the Bay Area are trying to do that.

“We all are having a serious challenge,” Breed said. “It is not going to be San Francisco that will solve this problem alone. We need regional partners to help address.”

The latest sign of that cooperation was the simultaneous release Thursday of the preliminary Housing and Urban Development homeless numbers by leaders of the three counties with the most serious homeless problems — San Francisco, Santa Clara and Alameda. That had not happened before.

“We all have to collectively up our investments in homelessness prevention, and as a region we have to accelerate the creation of low-income housing,” said Jennifer Loving, executive director of the nonprofit Destination: Home in Santa Clara County. “Homelessness is solvable. It’s a man-made crisis.”

She gets full agreement on that point from plenty of people stuck in street life.

Out along Cesar Chavez Street and its surrounding avenues in the Bayview, where lines of RVs regularly get cleared away only to reappear, most occupants said they’d gladly trade their mobile digs for a stable home if they could.

“I’ve been up and down the West Coast, and things just keep getting worse,” said James Janisse, 45, who has lived in his neatly kept camper on Cesar Chavez for about a year while he does construction work. “You see more and more people in vehicles everywhere — Walmart parking lots, in the woods, on the sides of roads. I’d love to have a house, but housing is too expensive, and jobs don’t pay enough.”

“When you live in a vehicle you have to be a good citizen, clean up, show good heart and help out your neighbors because people can be afraid of you when they see you living like this,” Janisse said. “This is a nice town. But these are hard times. Some of us just don’t have as many choices as other people.”

Kevin Fagan is a longtime reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle. He specializes in enterprise news-feature writing and breaking news, taking particular pleasure in ferreting out stories others might not find — from profiling the desperate lives of homeless drug addicts to riding the rails with hobos, finding people who sleep in coffins and detailing the intricacies of hunting down serial killers.

From 2003 to 2006, Kevin was the only beat reporter in the United States covering homelessness full time. He has witnessed seven prison executions and has covered many of the biggest breaking stories of our time, from the Sept. 11 terror attacks at Ground Zero and the Columbine High School massacre to Barack Obama’s election as president, the deadly Mendocino Complex, Wine Country and Ghost Ship fires and the Occupy movement. Homelessness remains a special focus of his, close to his heart as a journalist who cares passionately about the human condition.

He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from San Jose State University and was raised in California and Nevada.